


The Bitter Love

by HappinessIsBlau



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics)
Genre: Dark, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-29
Updated: 2016-07-29
Packaged: 2018-07-27 10:04:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7613848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HappinessIsBlau/pseuds/HappinessIsBlau
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They were just more people that he couldn’t save.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Bitter Love

**Author's Note:**

> I really love the portrayal of Batman comics as a gothic crime noir and Gotham as this place of death and vice. Anyway, I always wanted to write something dark without a happy ending. Warnings for this fic include: hinted rape, drug use, non consensual/dubiously consensual prostitution, and just general depressingness in general. 
> 
> Also, if you know where I pulled the names Alice and Keisha, kudos to you!

Her mouth tasted bitter. She sat on her bed, the body of her girlfriend next to her. She hadn’t done it, of course – no, she’d never hurt Alice. Her eyes stung and she remembered what she’d heard about not disturbing the crimescene. It’s not like it mattered what happened to her now, anyway—Alice was gone, and they’d always fought something fierce. It was just their personalities; they hated each other just as painfully as they’d loved. The neighbors knew they’d fought all the time, she’d be the prime suspect. They wanted to get married and move out of Gotham. They’d talked about it just yesterday; Alice’s mother never approved of their relationship, and Keisha’s job was transferring her to Star City. It was perfect. They were going to leave behind their fighting, their shitty apartment, all of that – and start over fresh. 

Of course, that would never happen now. Keisha took the gun from its place on the bed and threw it across the room. It hit the wall with a thump; that thump betrayed how terrible the weapon really was, and what it took away from her. 

Keisha was determined to get rid of that awful thing. To punish it for what it did to her, as if it acted by its own volition and someone else hadn’t pulled the trigger. Keisha shifted to get up, scrubbing at her eyes with blood-covered fingers, when lightning flashed outside and she saw his silhouette against the wall; the Batman. He’d come to take her away, she was certain. 

“You can’t hurt me anymore,” she laughed, staring at the silhouette. Her voice didn’t sound like her own. “Everything that I ever cared about is dead now. I don’t care what you do! Take me to jail, I don’t care!” She stood up and turned around to face him, her inhibitions gone. She was high, now. High on the realization that none of this had any consequence anymore. 

“You didn’t kill her,” he stated. He was impossibly tall and his voice was as dark and gravelly sounding as he looked. “It doesn’t fucking matter. I hope they give me the death penalty. I hope they kill me, because God knows I don’t want to live without her,” Keisha answered, her strength was leaving her rapidly. She needed to sit down. “I already caught the perpetrator,” he continued, “I saw them in here, struggling. I wasn’t fast enough. I’m sorry.” He was. She could tell that he was, but that didn’t bring back her Alice. “I don’t fucking care,” she spat. He just stood there. “You need to leave. The police need to collect… the forensic evidence,” it looked like he wanted to motion to Alice, poor, poor Alice and her splayed legs and her face that wasn’t there anymore, but he didn’t. Keisha was thankful that he didn’t.

She left the apartment. Actually, she turned on her heels then and ran out, and kept running until she didn’t know where she was, and she didn’t care. 

It was a month later until she saw him again. She had lost her job because she buried her grief under the strongest tequila she could get her hands on. She had lost her apartment because she didn’t have a job, and started doing whatever she could to get money to buy anything to make her forget. 

She was standing on the balcony of her most recent john, smoking a cigarette. She’d taken it up before Alice died, so it was the only vice she had left that she didn’t feel guilty about.

“Keisha,” he said. “Batman,” she replied, levelly. She had nothing to say to him. He had nothing to say to her and she knew it, in the way that the soon-to-be-dead were wise. “I’m sorry about Alice.” And she knew that he was, just like the way that she knew he was sorry on the night that Alice died and he didn’t save her. “I’m sorry, too,” she said.

He kept an eye on Keisha. He knew what was going to happen; she was going to kill herself slowly in the hopes that the pain she experienced was something like what happened to her girlfriend. There was nothing that he could do about that, but he felt responsible for her anyway. Alice’s blood was on his hands, and Keisha’s would be, too. They were just more people that he couldn’t save.


End file.
